This is a very welcome improvement but I should note the title is a bit clickbaity: using Swift on e.g. Cursor was always possible, it's just that after Microsoft banned forks from accessing the official VSCode marketplace last year you started having to workaround it by downloading and installing the .vsix file manually. Having the extension on the Open VSX Registry sorts this out so you can now install it via the proper way once more. Very happy this finally happened!
Use swift as a scripting language without the slow start time:<p>Swift Caching Compiler - <a href="https://github.com/jrz/tools" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/jrz/tools</a>
I think swift is a really great language from the design perspective.<p>What makes it unusable outside the apple ecosystem imho is that while the C interop is amazing on paper, it sucks hard in practice due to the abomination of pointer types they build in.<p>The "all pointers are evil" attitude doesn't help when you want to use a C library and noone will write rewrite all these libraries.
Some recent fixes went into 6.2.3 which really help with C interop, this post shows what that looks like in practice <a href="https://www.swift.org/blog/improving-usability-of-c-libraries-in-swift/" rel="nofollow">https://www.swift.org/blog/improving-usability-of-c-librarie...</a>
Not to be that agentic coding guy, but I think this will become less of a problem than our historic biases suggest.<p>For context, I just built a streaming markdown renderer in Swift because there wasn’t an existing open source package that met my needs, something that would have taken me weeks/months previously (I’m not a Swift dev).<p>Porting all the C libraries you need isn’t necessarily an overnight task, but it’s no longer an insurmountable mountain in terms of dev time.
My favorite part is the AI will still estimate projects in human-time.<p>“You’re looking at a multi-week refactor” aaaaand it’s done
Very high quality comment that is being downvoted unfairly because it defends AI. HN is on the wrong side of history on this one.
This is huge, long time coming. Interested to see if there is SwiftUI support.
This extension is for "pure" Swift development, not iOS development. I doubt the latter will ever officially happen. It's possible to make it work for iOS at an unofficial capacity though by hooking into the extension's LSP support. We did this at Spotify to enable iOS development in Cursor for Bazel iOS projects: <a href="https://github.com/spotify/sourcekit-bazel-bsp" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/spotify/sourcekit-bazel-bsp</a>
No so straightforward, but there is project that parses xcodebuild logs and pass them to lsp to provide LSP for SwiftUI projects <a href="https://github.com/SolaWing/xcode-build-server" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/SolaWing/xcode-build-server</a><p>Also I build extra tooling to facilitate iOS development in VSCode <a href="https://github.com/sweetpad-dev/sweetpad" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/sweetpad-dev/sweetpad</a>
What type of support do you mean? Language checking? Live previews?
I recently started to enjoy working in Xcode more than before, using Swift. Not sure what changed, but it seems more responsive for lack of a better expression.
i was hoping this was going to be AppCode rising from the grave but nah it's just more rebranded versions of VSCode. nothing new here
TLDR: same VScode extension now listed on OpenVSX registry, for Eclipse Theia et al.<p>But it's unclear if they tested it. For me, it fails basic configuration steps on the simplest project. Plugin compatibility between VSCode and others seems iffy.<p>Couple this with Xcode 26.4 AI lacking agentic features and you get Swift programmers being left behind.
Now if only they'd open up iOS development so we can get AppCode back.<p>The primary thing keeping me away from trying it again is I have to use Xcode instead of my beloved JetBrains IDEs where I know all the keyboard shortcuts.
Is there an open—source Swift IDE that can modify itself without restarting? (written in Swift) I loved Oberon µSystems Oberon/F aka Component Pascal for that capability.<p>Or am I going to have to vibe-code one.
We’ve used SweetPad and it worked fine for us, so this doesn’t change much.
The loss of AppCode from Jetbrains was a huge blow to my motivation to continue working with Swift. Xcode just can't compare.
I've recently been using this plugin [1], which is still under development but is an adequate stopgap until a better solution comes along.<p>[1]: <a href="https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/22150-noctule-the-swift-ide" rel="nofollow">https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/22150-noctule-the-swift...</a>
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I don't even see the code. All I see is blonde, brunette, redhead.
What the heck type of software are you shipping that you can just avoid looking at the slop the LLM serves you?